Indian Wars & the Vietnam Experience

By Ben Chitty

By the time we were drafted or enlisted to fight in Vietnam,
we had already been indoctrinated for that war since childhood
by the mythology of America. One myth we soaked up was "cowboys
and Indians" - the long saga telling how white Europeans
carved a great nation out of a land inhabited by savages. But
when we went to war, it wasn't much like the movies. Not much
of a script. The guys in white hats weren't winning, and weren't
the good guys anyway. The victims weren't grateful. Death wasn't
noble. War was mostly confusing and sometimes terrifying. At best,
we survived to come back.

War taught us some things. We learned that politicians tell
lies, and call themselves "patriots," that the "national
interest" usually means someone can make a lot of money.
We knew that the honesty and loyalty and sacrifice required of
us in war were worth a lot more than the dishonest, manipulative,
greedy politics which sent us into combat.

But Vietnam had another, harder lesson for us. We saw the "American
way of life" from a different angle, at the edge of the empire.
We enforced it, made it work. Nations occupied. Populations terrorized
and decimated. Countrysides laid waste. Societies and cultures
destroyed. For what? So that people would fear us, and learn that
opposing the United States government meant poverty, misery, and
death. So that corporations could keep making money. So that colonels
and commanders could become generals and admirals. So that politicians
could get re-elected.

Back in the world, home looked different. The country we served
- it turned out to be a racist nation from the very beginning,
when the indigenous peoples were killed to clear the land, and
Africans enslaved and transported to work the newly-cleared land.
The system we defended - it was set up so that a lot of people
had to be poor so that a few could get rich, and poor and working
people, our own families and friends, had to squabble over fewer
and fewer opportunities. The same culture which taught us to be
soldiers also turned women into objects, things to be bought and
used, brutalized and discarded. It taught such fear and hatred
of homosexuality that gay people were beaten on the streets, just
for "fun." It produced masterpieces of machinery which
no one could control, and stripped and poisoned the land to protect
and increase the margin of profit. What a world to come home to.

Then when we looked again at our own history, our war in Indochina
turned out to be an all-American war. The Dominican Republic,
Korea, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Philippines, Cuba, Mexico:
American soldiers fought in all these countries, occupying some,
annexing others, installing puppet regimes in the rest, extending
or defending an empire. A bitter irony - we had wanted to serve:
we wanted to be patriots. African Americans whose parents couldn't
vote; Chicanos and Puerto Ricans whose culture dissolved into
assimilated poverty. Poor and working-class whites tracked into
the draft instead of college or the National Guard. Native Americans
proving they too were "real" Americans. The real war
- it turned out - was here at home too, and we had been on the
wrong side.

If this country is ever to be the kind of country we wanted
to serve, it has to change. The change has to come from the beginning,
from the very foundations of our society. The real war goes on
still - Angola, Grenada, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq - are
all combat fronts which opened after the fall of Saigon. But the
oldest war in our history is the Indian War, the war over the
land. Our own war looked something like this war. The "wild
West" was a free-fire zone. General Custer was on a search-and-destroy
mission at Little Big Horn. Not much to choose between Wounded
Knee and My Lai, or between forced relocation to new reservations
and the resettlement camps we built in Vietnam.

One lesson we learned is also the same. The only basis for
a just and lasting peace is freedom - the recognition of the right
of all peoples to self determination.

500 years is long enough: it's time to make an end to this,
the oldest war in our land.

-----

Author's note: This was first drafted for the Veterans Peace
Convoy to Big Mountain, which crossed the country in 1990 to deliver
humanitarian supplies to the Dineh living in resistance on Hopi-Partition
Land in the Big Mountain area in Arizona. It was revised and reissued
for the 1992 Columbus Day gathering at the United Nations.